How to Understand the New Age of War: A Conversation With Lawrence D. Freedman

0:00I'm Dan Kurtz-Felan, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. My own view, maybe this is just a function of getting older, is that I'm less impressed with what you can do with military power. It just, the trouble with violence is it seems like it's definitive. It just sorts stuff out, and it rarely does. By some measures, there is more war in the world today than at any point since World War II. Today's wars have brought a level of destruction, disruption, and global risk that would have seemed hard to imagine not long ago, often in places where such combat seemed a thing of the past. Policymakers once again worry about nuclear use, and military planners once again contemplate war between great powers, including the U.S.

0:45and China and NATO and Russia. And all of this comes as the Trump administration dismantles key pieces of the international system and technology scrambles expectations about how wars start, unfold, and end. No one has left a greater mark on our understanding of wars past and present than Lawrence Friedman. Friedman has written a slew of definitive books on military strategy and history, and he has offered some of the most penetrating analysis of Iran, Ukraine, and more in the pages of Foreign Affairs and elsewhere. I spoke with Friedman on Monday, September 14th, about the course of today's conflicts, about what is and is not changing in the nature of war, and about why policymakers, military officers, and strategists so often start wars based on bad assumptions and how those bad assumptions explain some of the biggest calamities in global security today.

1:42Laurie, it's wonderful to have you back on the podcast. It's very good to be here. There's no shortage of reasons why I was eager to have you back. There are plenty of wars to talk about and plenty that you've written in our pages in recent years that continues to shed light on all of those wars. But there is an additional reason we wanted to have you on. It's a bittersweet one. You have been our military book reviewer for more than 20 years. And after our November, December issue, you will be stepping down from that post, though I hope still appearing in our pages with some frequency. I'm extremely excited about your successor, whom we will reveal soon, but we'll still miss having you in that role.

2:18and reflecting on those decades and looking back at your work over them, my mind goes to a very big question. At the start of that period in late 2002, we were in the early years of America's 9-11 wars. I think that moment, if I can remember where the conversation was, Afghanistan seemed to be going pretty well, at least when viewed from Western capitals and there was debate raging about Iraq. But I think few people in that debate really registered just how consequential the mistake of that war would be. But even with those, it was, I think, hard to imagine at that time just how much major war we'd be seeing a couple of decades later and the extent to which great power war is once again something we contemplate quite seriously.

3:00Nuclear use has been talked about. The fear of that is certainly higher than it was at that point. By some measures, there's more war in the world now than at any point since World War II. So again, to go big, how do you understand that arc? Why did we see the return of major war after a period in which it seemed, I think, in the past. I mean, it's very sad, nothing else. If you go back to the 90s, one can overstate the optimism of that decade, because there were terrible things that happened in the 90s too. Rwanda being an obvious example. The Balkan Wars ended up okay, I guess, but they seemed difficult at times.

3:39And again, there were some terrible events during those. But by and large, the feeling was that the West was on top. It had come out ahead in the Cold War. Other countries that have been our adversaries were adopting Western ways. That was the meaning of globalization. and that if we were going to use military force, it would be at our discretion. And I think the first thing that 9-11 shattered was the idea that this was up to us. Somebody brought the war to the United States in a dramatic way, and it's not that nobody had foretold that sort of event, but it seemed very worst case, and here we are when the worst case had happened.

4:25And I think that was the second impact of 9-11, is if you said, well, that's the worst case, people say, well, the worst case happened. Very fanciful scenarios were developed about how Iraq had developed the bomb, handed over to al-Qaeda, both of which required a lot of stretch. But you didn't dare to say that's impossible because the impossible had happened. And I think the decisions by the Bush administration to globalise the war on terror, to make it not about how you deal with this wretched Al-Qaeda stuck somewhere in Afghanistan, but you'd make it a much bigger thing. You'd try and sort out all sorts of old scores and issues that hadn't been done before.

5:16That's what got us into trouble. if it had been confined to al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. I think the outcomes would have been very different, including in Afghanistan. But ambition took over, a main hubris as well. If we turn to the war that is consuming the Middle East right now and a lot of American foreign policy attention, the one in Iran, you've been pretty unsparing about the extent of the Trump administration's error in both going to war and conducting it. You've called it a stupid war, which is much worse than a bad war. It does, however, seem in keeping with some of the persistent American errors when it comes to the use of force, especially in that region.

5:59Do you see it as different in kind or just in kind of degree of error? And to the extent it is similar to those. Why does the U.S. keep making this kind of mistake? I mean, it is a stupid war because the consequences were forecast. Anybody who dealt with the Middle East who'd looked at the Iran issue, really since the Bush administration, knew the two things that would happen would be the Straits of Formos and Hezbollah come back again. So it wasn't, there was no surprise there. You cannot argue, of course, that the Americans are not unique in making the sort of error that assumes that because you've got your really great power and you've got super military forces, that you can do what you want.

6:49And that as long as you get it over quickly, all will be well. So Trump, in that sense, made the same error as Putin. And obviously this is not yet in terms of human life and death and destruction as bad a war as Ukraine. But it's very consequential. And I think what, to me, still is what's staggering about it is the lack of thought that went into it. I mean, to have Benjamin Netanyahu come along with a plan and then discuss that and decide, oh, that seems a good idea. I mean, even with Iraq, I mean, there was a year of active debate and discussion, and it was based on false premises, and they still got it wrong.

7:33But at least everybody knew what the issues were and where the risks were. and some attempt was made to mitigate them, but at least there was an active public debate. This one just got everybody by surprise. There was no full discussion even within the administration. Of course, you've got an administration that's been hollowed out, that doesn't have the capacity and expertise that previous administrations have. So this is the same old mistake of underestimating the enemy, believing that you can get it all sorted out quickly before all the bad things could happen. And these are pretty standard mistakes, not just for the United States.

8:12Other countries have made them as well. But the legacy of this is going to be with us for many years, even assuming we can get through the immediate economic consequences, which are pretty serious. You wrote a fantastic piece for foreign affairs, I believe last year, called The Age of Forever Wars, where you talked about the short war fallacy, the way that this kind of assumption that decisive, overwhelming force will bring a quick victory? You wrote a follow-up recently called Iran and the Short War Fallacy, where you show how this thinking is part of the error that led us to this point. What's the mindset that makes that such a frequent mistake by both American policymakers, but also others?

8:55I think the problem is that's what military planners plan for. I mean, nobody in their right mind plans to launch a long war. If you're going to go to war, you want it over quickly. And you assume that's true of your adversary as well. So the mindset of military planners is quite short-term. And indeed, if you try to think about how to prepare for a protracted war, our societies would find it very difficult because you'd need far greater mobilization, more stocks. It would consume a lot more resources, whereas the hope is always with a short war, you get it over quick and you barely notice it, it's barely a blip in terms of the economy and industrial capacity and so on.

9:42And you look at Russia and you see how Russia has had to transform its economy for the worse because of its failure with its short war. So the problem is that military planners don't think about this, that they're focused on short war. They get excited by the latest technology, and you can see that, again, with this one, particularly with the targeting and the speed with which you get from identifying targets to actually destroy them, the role of AI and all of that. And I think there was also a mindset, which is very strong in this Pentagon, which is you look at military force in terms of military objectives.

10:29You don't look at it in terms of the wider political objectives. And so it took a long time before Pete Hegseth seemed to recognize this was not a victory, even though in terms of the loss of capability, Iran appeared to have come off worse. He was boasting when the ceasefire was announced, so this is a victory with a capital V and so on. It looks downright embarrassing now. So I think if you are going to fight a war, you need to link them with what you're trying to achieve politically. And I think the problem with Iran is the political objectives were muddled. It started with regime change. Then it was getting a better nuclear deal.

11:15Now it's opening the Strait of Hormuz. But there was never clarity on this. I think the regime change in particular was very problematic. I mean, the Israelis seem to have convinced themselves, as they do with a number of their adversaries, that if you take out sufficient numbers of the elite, if you decapitate, effectively they'll fall apart. But they don't. Not these countries. They thought about it. and Iran was well aware of what might be coming up. And it's not even clear that, I mean, Trump seemed to have had in mind that if he took out the right people and left better people, that you could do a Venezuela-type deal with them, which was complete fantasy.

11:59So, I mean, nuclear, you could have got a better nuclear deal by negotiating, so you've got no nuclear deal at all at the moment, and an Iranian regime that has been reminded of why it might want nuclear weapons. So for all these reasons, it was ill thought through, objective poorly defined, and a military system geared to the short term and taking out the enemy's military system, rather than trying to work out what's necessary to do to get to what we want to achieve. Has anything in Iran's military response particularly struck you? Have been impressed in an amoral sense by their use of drones or the way they've escalated or anything else?

12:44I think from Iran's point of view, it was always going to be about survival. Once it was clear that the Americans were not going to use ground forces, their task became a lot easier. So the issue is one of survival, which meant having replacements for senior people in case they got killed, which many did. Being prepared to suppress any popular protest. Well, it's already shown that they're prepared to slaughter their own people in the thousands. So they were well prepared for that. Protecting as much as possible of your missile production as well as launching capability. And they've been able to do that.

13:26And then I think what surprised people was the speed with which they went for the straight-to-form move. because in June 25, they had a much more cautious response. The Americans had concluded that the Iranians probably wouldn't fight very hard. The Iranians concluded that they needed to. So they were prepared. And I think once that happened, we were in a completely different conflict for which there was no shortage of warning. It shouldn't have come as a surprise, but there wasn't great preparation. There's a line in your Age of Forever Wars essay, you're right, when a short war plan does not produce the anticipated victory, the challenge for military leaders is to achieve a new alignment between means and ends.

14:15How would you do that in Iran at this point from a U.S. perspective? I think it's very difficult because unfortunately, I don't think this is great for the Iranians, the hardliners have used the opportunity to take control. And if you were concerned about the plight of the Iranian people, they'd be interested in compromises. I mean, they can take income from the Strait of Hormuz if they get that sorted out at some point. But what they really need is Iranian assets to be unfrozen and for the oil industry to be allowed to flourish. Now, all of that was made possible by the MOU. So there was a deal available, which was not a bad deal from the Iranian perspective.

15:06But I think they got fixated on the Strait of Hormuz as their leverage. And instead of taking the opportunity to let that open, the men really, I mean, they've shown that they can close it at any time. So they weren't going to lose their leverage just by letting it open and allowing more negotiations to take place on the nuclear side and frozen assets and so on. Now we've got a real problem because you depend on debates within Tehran, of which we have very little influence or control, in which the hardliners certainly have the advantage. And we've used up a lot of our capacity. I mean, the United States can occasionally knock things out.

15:53and tankers going to Iranian ports, but it can't make a material difference to Iranian capabilities at the moment. So you're relying on economic pressure, which is real, and you would wish the regime took it into account, but the regime has got other priorities. In my mind, but maybe this is too influenced by what happened with the hostage crisis in 1980, They're waiting until after the midterms, a member will see. I think they want to hurt Trump. He was part of the assassination of their comrades, mutilated the current Ayatollah and killed his father. They've been Israeli bombs, but the Americans are part of it.

16:39I think they want to punish. Just as they wanted to hurt Jimmy Carter. So famously, the hostages were only released as Reagan was inaugurated. In going back and reading all of the excellent work you've done for foreign affairs over the years, I was struck by a line in a piece you wrote in 2006. This was after you'd done the UK's official history of the Falklands War. And in reflecting on kind of European or British views of the American approach to the use of force, you wrote, the problem with Washington since World War II has been not so much its predilection for using military force as a first resort as its hesitation and uncertainty when going to war.

17:18Is that the kind of flip side of the short war fallacy, that it's kind of lack of commitment to a serious war because of that delusion? Or is there some other dynamic intention of that? It is a problem. It seems to be either one thing or the other, but not very nuanced in between. I mean, if you look back to, again, going back to the 1990s and the factors that influenced Blair as British Prime Minister after 9-11, Blair was very worried that the Americans were drifting away. I mean, a lot of the issues that we now worry about in terms of, in Europe, about the American commitment to our security and so on, were all present then.

18:05And if you look at, indeed, the famous article that Condoleezza Rice wrote for you during the 2000 campaign, clearly there was no great interest in humanitarian intervention at all. She thought it was not how the United States should comport itself, what Colin Powell had said. So the idea that Blair was seized on, that Western countries had to take in far greater responsibility for making the world generally a better place, and that may include using military force. I mean, that was why when 9-11 came, he thought this was the moment when he needed to persuade Bush that there were ways of doing this that would be more widely beneficial.

18:53And so it comes back to the old line about your allies' fears of either abandonment or entrapment. Either the US ignores your problems and needs you to sort them out, even though you struggle to do so, or get so involved that you get caught up with things that actually increase the danger rather than ease them. It's the challenge of being a junior partner in an alliance. You pointed out the ways in which Putin going into Ukraine was similarly subject to the short war fallacy or the delusion. You've more recently described the situation in Ukraine as a quote hurting stalemate, which means each side is trying to increase the pain and cost to the other side and then hope that that affects decision making.

19:38It's not clear that Putin has done the kind of recalibration you recommend for leaders when the short war fallacy comes back to bite them. Looking at the at the war now, it does seem like each side is trying to increase costs, especially to populations back at home and hoping that affects decision making. I think on the Ukrainian side, there's been more solidary commitment than certainly most of us would of imagine five years ago before the war started, whether that can sustain through what will presumably be a very tough winter for Ukrainians is a separate question. But on the Russian side, this ultimately comes down to Putin and his own sense of his own interests and potential threats to his rule.

20:21What are you looking for here? What is your kind of theory of how this might proceed if you're trying to be optimistic from a Ukrainian perspective? And is that the kind of best theory of victory that we can come up with for the Ukrainians at this point? I mean, the term hurting still made, it's not mine. But the basic idea that it's not clear how either side wins in the way it wants to win, and they're both hurting in the process, that's true. So I think one of the first things I wrote on the full-scale invasion, not for my substat, not for you, was I said this is a war Putin can't win, because I just couldn't see how he could occupy and subjugate all of Ukraine.

21:03And that remains the case. And it's still the case that even if he achieved the immediate military objectives, you have to wonder what sort of prize the Donbass is now. It's been ruined by the war, by the aggression. But Putin believes somehow that this is a thing that he has to win because failure to do so will undermine the credibility of him as a leader. There will be an awful lot of explaining to do as to what this was all about, why the economy has been brought down for really rather limited territorial gains. And so he's been very stubborn. And again, go back to the first thing I wrote. It was thinking about the difference between a democratic society and an authoritarian one.

21:56I mean, at least still in our countries, when we screw up, we can talk about it and urge our governments to find a way out or throw them out if they fail to do so. That's not possible in Russia. Moreover, you've got a system which, as far as we can tell, does not provide the leader with the truth. Now, he may know that his forces are not doing as well as claimed. He should have cottoned on by now that he's been forecasting imminent victory for a couple of years now and may wonder why it hasn't yet happened. But he doesn't let on. And this causes Russian forces at the front some difficulties. And we've seen recently in Lyman and so on some real setbacks for Russian forces.

22:47This doesn't over-egg it, but it's not trivial. So we're left with a question which we've had since the start. What is it that will persuade Putin that he should cut his losses and cut a deal? And so far, he just hasn't been prepared to do so, despite the degradation of the Russian economy and so on. I think at the moment, the general view, it's a Ukrainian view, and I think probably a Russian view, is that we're into another six-month period. Can the Ukrainians cope with the winter? Can the Ukrainians find more money to fund their war, basically from Europe? because as things stand, Russia has been pretty systematic about degrading the Ukrainian economy as Ukraine has done its best to degrade the Russian economy.

23:46Will he still be far away or unable to take the fortress cities? And if that's the case, is somebody going to be able to say in the Kremlin, we've really got to stop this? If we can't succeed when the condition seems so propitious, and with the Ukrainians strengthening their hand, new ballistic missiles starting to come on stream and so on, they've shown real imagination, originality in tactics and technologies and so on. Really, it's time to get out. I mean, the American mediation efforts are pretty amateurish. so I don't think but they're there if Putin wants them I mean I think that's again the Ukrainian view it's not that they are that interested in American proposals they just want to see if there's any concessions coming through at which point I think they would quite like a ceasefire but it has to be said and we must keep this in mind even if you wanted a ceasefire and you weren't trying to solve all the different issues between Russia and Ukraine A ceasefire would be a tremendously difficult thing to actually negotiate.

25:04Where is the front line? Both sides have different views about where it is. Who's going to decide? Russians go around planting flags, and then the people who've planted the flags get killed. But the image is being taken. So they make claims about holding places that they don't hold. So I don't think a ceasefire would be very easy, or at least it wouldn't get beyond a cessation of fire, but it wouldn't get into marking the line of contact. I think it's just going to be tremendously difficult. And then the Russians will want economic sanctions eased and so on. So even if you don't want a big peace negotiation, which could take a year, even just getting a ceasefire agreement in place could be really difficult.

25:53and the Americans can't deliver it by themselves. And as soon as you start talking about sanctions, you've got to talk to the EU and the UK and Canada and so on. And given the tortured nature of relationships between the US and its allies, that's not going to be easy either. Are there historical parallels that are illuminating here of a personalist leader like Putin who seems almost suicidally dogged and unshakable until he's not? The examples that jump most immediately to mind and suggest otherwise that you kind of end up in a self-destructive kind of delusional spiral, but maybe there's some bigger points in the other direction.

26:29Well, I mean, you're talking about individual psychologies here. I mean, the obvious one is Hitler, who eventually shot himself in his bunker, but we're not going to get to that stage with Russia because Ukraine isn't going to invade and march to Moscow. I think everything needs to be looked at in its own terms. And I think, you know, one of the things this does, these wars does, both the Americans and the Russians, is it should be a reminder to IR theorists that you can have all the historical models that you like. In the end, when you've got these type of individuals in leadership positions, predictability becomes very difficult.

27:12It's just challenging in a moment when so many of the major powers are led by individuals who are similar kind of personalistic in their approach. Well, it's just a lot of individuals, isn't it? I mean, you know, we don't talk about countries. We talk about Putin and Trump and Erdogan and Netanyahu and Xi and so on. Now, you know, there's always some restraints. they've all got to in some ways be sensitive to their uh their wider political and economic situations but this is you know the people uh despise the great man theory of history and these aren't particularly great men but they're all men and they're all very powerful how have you understood the conversation around russian nuclear use in in ukraine as you've kind have heard the fears expressed by policymakers.

28:05It's obviously hard to know exactly what intelligence they're seeing. But do you see that as a kind of plausible fear or something that Putin is doing to spook Western supporters of Ukraine? I'd be more sanguine on that than many other analysts. And I think the reason is because I think the nuclear arsenal is very important to Putin. I mean, it's what makes Russia a great power, because without it, it would be a very large and rather unsuccessful middling power. And without the nuclear capability, NATO probably would have come in and supported Ukraine. There would have been no massive risks in not doing so.

28:47So it's had a deterrent effect, which we shouldn't ignore. And Putin has always concentrated in his own commentary on the importance of NATO not sending its own troops, not fighting side by side with the Ukrainians. A lot of the other stuff has come from Medvedev and some media characters and analysts like Karaganov, who basically think that they haven't used their nuclear arsenal enough. or in Medvedev's case, as long as you talk about Armageddon, that maybe you can stop the alliance sending particular weapons or agreeing new targeting rules or Finland and Sweden can join the alliance. And it's just overused.

29:34I mean, there are so many threats which were never followed through that it's just lost all credibility, which I think was the complaint by some of the hardliners in Russia. so my view is that probably even if NATO forces did end up on Ukrainian soil as they may do after a ceasefire I still think Putin would be reluctant to start a nuclear war I mean it's not a great idea it's not obvious what you gain from it people tend to assume that it panics well I think probably would panic the Ukrainians, it would panic people in Moscow too. I mean, it wouldn't go down well in Beijing. So I don't particularly think it's high on Putin's to-do list, but it does have a deterrent effect to major intervention.

30:28Beyond that, there's plenty of ways, as Putin has showed, of escalating this war without having to use nukes. So, you know, there was this period in September, October 22, and we'll maybe at some point find out more about Russian decision making. But my view was then is that we shouldn't allow ourselves to get spooked. And the sad thing is that a lot of things that might have been done for Ukraine early on were not done because of some view that there were red lines that would be crossed. And, you know, Putin was never going to go to war because you're going to send tanks rather than instead of not just anti-tank missiles.